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User blog:MacTheEpic/Me and The Twins
Lord Boredom makes his yearly return. How hast thou been, thy fellow cohorts and colleagues? I've been thinking of ZT a lot lately, with a lot of feelings. Namely, disappointment. Not that I'm disappointed that the site's not as popular and will likely never will be ever again nor the fact that the mods don't really care for it anymore (although we'll get to that later), but I'm more disappointed in myself. I don't mean that in a sense of "Oh man, I wish I was more popular", because I don't, but I mean it more in a sense of, "That could've gone better." Let me explain. I never really finished any of my series', I always stopped somewhere in the middle or sometimes before they even got off the ground. People would always be sort of dismayed or disappointed at me discontinuing a series, but no one was ever as disappointed as I was. Ever since I was a kid, I loved a good story, being unable to even finish one was heartbreaking to me. I wanted to make people feel things as they watched my movies. I wanted people to laugh, fall in love with the characters, cheer for their victories, mourn for their losses, I wanted them to come along on an adventure, but I never seemed to be able to hit the right note so I just shut it down before letting it get any worse. Every time I began a new series I was confident that this new one would finally be the one to stick the landing. None of them ever did, at least not for long, anyway. Case in point: Epic, the series that got so close to finally being what I had been trying to create for so long. A magnificent masterpiece, a work of epic scope, length, depth, and storytelling. Of course, it wasn't like that at all. But it was pretty well-liked at first. And I liked making it too, at first. But my vision for the story started to become cloudy and muddled, which led to a terrible second season (but a pretty good finale, imo). I just didn't know what to do with it. I had my overarching villain, but how the hell was I going to get there? That led to me half-assedly including mythological cryptids into my story for a good portion of it, but it also led to the creation of an apparently well-hated (which means a success in this case), villain, Edward Tumbleton. But that doesn't make the storyline any less shoe-horned in. Granted, a lot of Epic was just taking random things and sort of compacting them all together. There was an old ninja sensei who taught them how to shoot energy blasts (which never really showed up again in the story), they went to Gotham City and fought the Joker for whatever reason, they went back in time and met Link for whatever reason, it was just all a sort of incoherent mish-mash of the first things that popped into my head. While it was fun at times, this was ultimately to Epic's detriment. I wanted to make the series a bit more dramatic and series (something you could see at the end of Season Two and onward), but there was no forgetting its silly and goofy past. There was no forgetting "The Hopper" that they had first used to cross dimensions, or those weird goblin minions Ssenkrad had but were never seen again. If you look back at some of the episodes, you can see parts where I thought I had a rough, but clear road that I wanted the series to follow, but I always abruptly turned or twisted or curved and the straight but long road turned into a spaghetti highway that makes your commute to work a living hell. In truth, only the first few episodes of Epic were okay, because that's when I thought I knew where I was going. And when I realized I didn't I panicked and then the gang ran off to Gotham. I had left abandoned plot strings everywhere, but you might've never noticed them. But if you think this is just me trash-talking my own series, here's an example: In Season Two, the Underworld plotline was supposed to be greatly expanded. The Minotaur and Hydra gang wars were actually going to be a massive civil war which would involve most of the regions in the Underworld. Rue, at some point, was supposed to go down into the Underworld and join Mac, and eventually Rue would be involved in some sort of a duel with the Minotaur, slay him, and take control of his gang. At the end of the war, Rue was going to overthrow Hades, and have weird Grim Reaper-like powers up on the surface. Of course, this saga would've taken FOREVER. So, understandably, I scrapped it. But that doesn't mean I'm still not disappointed about it. This brings me to the main point I'm trying to make about Epic: It wasn't thought out. I didn't know what I actually wanted from the story or what I wanted to do from the story. And that's the problem that plagued most of my series'. The only one it didn't was "The Zimmer Game" which was surprisingly well received (I know, saying 'well-received' when I'm taking about Zimmer Twins sounds pretentious, but I'm trying to be academic about this for whatever reason), even if it did earn me one content warning that I honestly didn't deserve. But back to what I was saying: it wasn't well thought out for what I wanted it to be. What I wanted the story to be was to be BIG and memorable, but I didn't know how. I also didn't want to waste time trying to figure it out, so I just bumrushed in and hoped for the best, just like I did with other series'. That's not to say that method doesn't work, it does, but not for something of this scope, and especially not for the platform of ZT. And by that I mean, that I can at least correct a first draft and go over it a few times to work out all the kinks. You can't first draft a ZT video. Well, you sort of can, but you can't save videos to be published or edited later to work all the kinks out in the story and make it more consistent. Of course, I could've waited until I had a plan, but when you're as impatient as I was back then, that wasn't an option. At the very least, a general outline of the story would've definitely helped. Add on to this the absurdly short ZT time limits (a minute, really?), the lack of animation clips, schoolwork (which, along with my lack of focus on the storyline, led to episodes being made way slower), the hypersensitivity to even a hint of slightly more mature content, my frustration, and my need for a platform that could improve the quality of the story, and you had a creator who remorsefully resented his creation, and a creation that couldn't live up to impossible standards set by its creator because of where it was and where it came from. Moving it to the Wikia was a logical next step for me, as I tried to improve the amount of depth I could achieve in the story while also still catering to my ZT audience. I even had some sort of plan this time! But it still didn't work, because I was just too impatient. I wanted to skip to the good part and I still felt restrained with the story. And that led to many things developing way faster than they should (Mac/Natalie, The Masked Man, the Resistence, etc). I also just didn't care about the story, I just wanted to see how you'd guys feel about it, at that point. It's the main reason I'm probably not going to continue it without some major retconning, I just don't like the story anymore. I'm working on a better one anyway (which I've told you guys about, and I'm still planning this one out and prepping for the real, first draft now). It takes too much time and I just don't really care for the characters, and when the characters are based on real users, you feel creatively restrained because you don't want to portray any of the characters negatively nor kill one off because you don't want to make that person mad or make them stop watching because their character was killed and now they have no reason to care (which is the only reason I had user-characters in the first place, I thought people wouldn't like it or get invested as much if I didn't). What I'm trying to say is, I'm disappointed my ZT run wasn't that successful or eventful, I was always in the background and none of my series' ever were as good as I wanted them to be, nor were people as invested in them as I was. But that was just me setting the expectations too high for something that was just meant for fun. The Zimmer Twins platform works best when you're enjoying yourself and not thinking too much about it. It works best when you're not feeling bored or like you have a duty to perform. It works best when you're enjoying the stories you create just as much as the audience does. It works best when you're having fun. Sorry for this disorganized ramble I pooped out of the sky at random, but I hope you enjoyed it or found it somewhat insightful. If you read it and were able to follow along, I thank you for your time. Like I said, working on a completely unrelated story at the moment but if you would ever like me to write another story here or liked one of my other stories, go ahead and tell me. If you thought some things could've been way better, tell me that too. Anyway, Mac out, hope you enjoyed. See ya'. Category:Blog posts